While Grace Exhibition Space curator-owners Jill McDermid and Erik Hokenson are occupying in downtown Manhattan, PPL curates from the streets, from craigslist, from arts social networks, and by word-of-mouth, making a concerted effort to shatter the autonomy of established, medium-specific performance communities. Artists will be provided with lights, sound, running water, a formalized public platform, and the context of “performance art” by one of the world’s best-known dedicated performance art spaces. After the show, artists and attendees go down to Zucotti Park to experiment with what kind of spectrum exists between “art” performance and “political” performance, between street theater, action, demonstration, intervention, performance art, and other forms, and to continue exploration of how performance artists participate in public culture.

The private is political, the local is global. Via skype, PPL and Dimanche Rouge join forces to present a simultaneous performance, as well as video, dance, and multi-media work streamed live across the Atlantic from Paris, France to Brooklyn NY, and vice versa. Participants, audiences, and attendees are also invited to fill out hand-drawn storycards for Canadian artist Anna Jane McIntyre, to be performed live via skype one week later, to co-create with Urban Layers, to engage with global practice-documentation project SPAN (Social Practices Arts Network) and create dance work to be performed and filmed by the choreographer/performer.

Five individual artists working in music composition, performance art, and interactive/internet forms describe, perform, and present projects that maintain artistic authorship and vision while experimenting with modes of participation, demonstration, and intervention. Come ready to partake in the bar, bring an instrument, bring a dry erase marker, bring a powerpoint presentation, bring an anecdote or joke, bring mittens.

Artist-curators, theorist-artists, and inter-disciplinary performers who wear “many hats” and come from many different performance backgrounds come together to share their work. Live participatory performances, talks, open bar, hands-on radio broadcasting from the space, and more!

How do artists work in a public sphere? How do artists become political agents, and how can create work, cultural organization, and social sculpture operate in socio-politically? What does ‘responsibility of form’ mean to us now? What are the political concerns of “avant-garde” theories and forms? Diverse artistic practices, from notarization of public statements during Occupy Wallstreet through co-creative urban mapping, through conceptualized musical improvisation are juxtaposed, discussed, experienced, and documented.

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These November weekends will bring together performances, workshops, and discussions that deal with the operations (social, political, aesthetic, economic, etc) of participatory, interactive, aleatoric, and other “open source” forms in the practices of artists, curators, and cultural organizers.